++ Launched in June 2015: Hensel, M. and Turko, J. (2015). Grounds and Envelopes - Reshaping Architecture and the Built Environment. London: Routledge.

If we are going to approach, as we must, a totality in the development of the environment, this will necessarily involve a re-examination and redefinition of all the components of the environment insofar as they are perceived and experienced by man.

Theodore Larson, Director and Founderof the Architecture Research Lab at University of Michigan

Dear friends and colleagues,

Performance-oriented Design is a research area dedicated to the formulation of an inclusive to design design based on the interaction between the different domains of agency that make up the human environment.

Performance-oriented Architecture, a subset of Performance-oriented Design, that engages the key concepts 'non-discrete architectures' and 'non-anthropocentric architectures'. The former seeks for a higher level intergration of architecture and environment that are locally specific and intesely embedded in their setting. The latter aims for an integration of ecology and urban ecology considerations on the scale of architecture.

Stage one of the research has been completed with the publication of Performance-oriented Architecture - Rethinking Architecture and the Built Environment, which sets the scene by outlining a number of traits of non-discrete and performance-oriented architecture.

Stage two is currently under way and focuses on the definition of what we call intensely local architecture and local tectonics. This stage encompasses [i] the repositioning of the local in the context of current processes of globalisation, [ii] a redefinition of the notion of tectonics, and [iii] a detailed description of what may constitute intensely local architectures in todays context. Integral part of this stage is to show that the potential of so-called non-standard architecture with its associated design approach is not simply found in the fact that a wide range of architectural forms can be generated, but that architecture can be designed to relate and respond to the highly specific circumstances it meets in a particular location.

Prof. Dr. Michael U. Hensel and Defne Sunguroğlu Hensel

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